Samuel Johnson: A Life
David Nokes
Henry Holt, 2009

Samuel Johnson: A Biography
W. Jackson Bate
Reprinted by Counterpoint, 1998

In writing his fast-paced, engaging new biography of the great and terrible Doctor Johnson, David Nokes has three separate massive, uphill battles to fight. The first is with Johnson himself, who was vain enough to relish attention but cynical enough to savage biographers (and whose life absolutely refuses the neat arcs and resolutions the current book-buying public seems to demand). The second is with James Boswell’s mesmerizing, idiosyncratically epic Life. And the third is W. Jackson Bate’s monumental 1975 biography, rightly called the greatest modern life of Johnson.

Johnson is of course immortal, and thanks to Johnson Boswell is too, but a modern aspirant to the post of Johnson biographer might hope that time and advancing scholarship would remove Bate from contention. Fortunately, no: Counterpoint has kept his book in print in a very handy paperback, and so it pops up as persistently as old King Hamlet’s ghost, intoning ‘remember me’ to every new contestant.

And scholarship likes to think it’s more important than it really is; in simple truth, as a full-dress biography Bate’s book is unsurpassable. Johnson roars and rumbles through its pages as vividly now as he did when I first read the book forty years ago. Bate’s command of the innumerable pigeonholes of Jonnsoniana is absolute, and his prose scintillates (bless the folks at Counterpoint for keeping this feast before us). Nokes’ is quite the best book on Johnson to appear since Bate, and his book is leaner and quicker, often with sentences stitching together quotes from Johnson and others that run on for paragraphs at a time. Great care and discernment went into this production, but it can’t escape periodic duets with its looming predecessor.

Here’s Nokes about Johnson’s famous Dictionary:

Writing the Dictionary’s Preface he struck an elegiac note, remembering that both his wife Tetty and his former publisher and friend, Edward Cave, were now deceased. The work, he wrote, ‘was written’ (not compiled, but written) with little ‘assistance of the learned’ and with no ‘patronage of the great’, not in ‘the soft obscurities of retirement’ nor under ‘the shelter of academick bowers’ but amidst ‘inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow’. The tone he struck was truculent. It was with ‘frigid tranquility’ that he affected to dismiss the Dictionary from him; but though this intensely personal statement goes beyond good taste, it makes one thing unmistakable. The Dictionary that he produced would be recognised as his.

And Bate, on the same work’s genesis:

The thought of creating an English dictionary that could stand comparison with these works [the standard Italian and French dictionaries of the previous century] had long depressed the spirits of any individual qualified even to begin on such a project. For of course it would have to be an individual. There was not only no academy in Great Britain similar to the French Academy but also, given the pride in British individualism, not much prospect of one.

Readers will decide for themselves (and on more evidence, obviously) which author they more fully trust, but the signal differences are on display even in excerpts: Bate is calm and summarizing where Nokes is urgent and intertextual. Bate tends toward a magisterial remove; Nokes takes us into the London streets and drawing-rooms, quoting Johnson & co. the whole time. Both do a superb job, although we’ll have to wait and see where Nokes’ book is in forty years. For the present, readers should rejoice at having both books at their disposal. Johnson would have fussed, but he’d have been pleased just the same.

– A.C. Childers